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SONTAG: REBORN – New York troupe The Builders Association offers prismatic solo show for Susan Sontag fans (and perhaps a few others)

By: Michael Grossberg

The Columbus Dispatch - November 16, 2012 05:35 PM

Who was Susan Sontag and why should we care?
That perhaps-impudent question is only answered obliquely in SONTAG: REBORN, but New York’s avant-garde troupe The Builders Association stages the solo play about one of America’s most influential public intellectuals with such verve, style and dry wit that even those relatively unfamiliar with Sontag might well be intrigued.
The Wexner Center for the Arts presentation, which opened Thursday night to a sold-out and highly appreciative crowd, will continue through Sunday in the Wexner Center Performance Space.
Crisply directed by Marianne Weems and performed brilliantly by Moe Angelis, the 70-minute one-act seems of greatest interest to those already well-acquainted with Sontag’s diverse works.

Moe Angelos in SONTAG: REBORN at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Credit: James Gibbs

That leaves the multimedia performance piece a potential must-see primarily for Sontag’s hardest-core of fans – which happens to include me.
I’ve admired Sontag for decades, from reading in the 1970s her 1960s-defining book of essays Against Interpretation and later, some of her novels and plays, to actually meeting her a few years before she died in 2004 and having an extended conversation with her over her insightful book Illness as Metaphor .
(That fortuitous stroke of good fortune – at least, for me – occurred when we happened to sit next to each other 10 minutes before the start of a performance at a Humana Festival of New American Plays visitor’s weekend at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky. Even though I had a very high estimate of Sontag just from that brief but fascinating and tantalizing conversation, she didn’t let me down.)

What has always intrigued me about Sontag are her brilliant and often-daring insights into culture, art and politics, from her category-defining “Notes on Camp” essay to her courageous but controversial late-in-life affirmation before a leftwing crowd at a trendy rally that socialism is really fascism and that “Stalinism is the most successful variant of fascism.”
SONTAG: REBORN explores none of that, arguably to its detriment.
(Though as a theater critic, I usually hesitate to disagree with a playwright’s choice of subject, in this case I wonder how much better a more all-embracing portrait of Sontag might be onstage.)
I never knew much – or cared at all – about Sontag’s private life. Yet, that is the focus of this piece, which ultimately did make me empathize with her coming of age as an intellectual and her passionate rites of passage as an emerging lesbian and newfound lover.
Angelos’ adaptation does what perhaps is the only thing one could do to dramatize such interior emotions, conflicts and psychological states. She externalizes the conflicts by splitting the central character into her older and younger selves, which brilliantly allows a prismatic dual perspective: age/youth, experience/innocence, cynicism/idealism, self-acceptance/self-deprecation.
(Not to mention an intellectual's favorite intellectual dynamic: affirmation of self; self-critique of self.)

Some of what the younger Sontag puts herself through, during flights of rhapsodic ecstasy or anguish, comes across as touching or amusing. Both work to shine a light on the universal rites of awkward adolescence that we all go through – a touchstone that occasionally helps this narrow work find a broader reach.
Most often, though, I simply got caught up in the mesmerizing flow of words, drawn from Sontag’s journals, and spoken by Angelis as both the older writer (onscreen, re-reading the diaries of her younger self with a withering skepticism but also a bracingly ironic sense of humor) and the younger Sontag at various stages of her life from student to fresh-faced bohemian to wife to mother to lover to a more jaded and self-questioning bohemian artist-thinker.
That flow of words often becomes palpable - and beautiful - in the rear-screen projections as the dialogue bursts into written lines as words are spoken liveand then almost float off the page or stage and screen.
Kudos to Austin Switser’s enveloping video design, Laura Mroczkowski’s chiaroscuro lighting and Dan Dobson’s evocative sound design, which together do so much to bring both Sontag and SONTAG:REBORN to life.
Just as Sontag is an acquired taste, SONTAG isn’t for everyone. But for those touched by the woman and her writings, the Builders Association has crafted a touching and amusing work.

IF YOU GO
The Builders Association will present SONTAG: REBORN at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in the performance space of the Wexner Center for the Arts, 1871 N. High St.
Tickets cost $20, or $17 for members, $10 for students. Call 614-292-3535 or visit www.wexarts.org.